David E. James: Center for Interdisciplinary Research: Faculty Fellowship, 2003-04 Film and Popular Music in the United States and Britain since the 1950s. 1. Impact: This proposal is for an interdisciplinary research project across the fields of Film & Television, Music, and English Literature. It will impact cinema history in presenting a full account of the history of a genre that has so far been entirely neglected, that is, the musical based on contemporary popular music; it will impact musicology in demonstrating how cinema and television have for the past half century been crucial in the formulation and dissemination of new musical styles; and it will impact literary history in showing how the thematics and social existence of Romantic poetry have been reproduced in another medium some two hundred years after their initial formulation. 2. Research Project: In England in early summer 2002, the popular press was preoccupied with the events surrounding the celebration of the Queen’s fiftieth year as monarch. Only a couple of weeks after Paul McCartney, Eric Clapton, and other rock and roll royalty had performed for the real royals at the Jubilee itself, the lead Rolling Stone, singer Mick Jagger was knighted in Queen’s Jubilee Birthday Honors List. Whatever one’s feeling about the intrinsic qualities of the music behind these recognitions, it is clear that a cultural movement that was once thought to herald the Decline of Western Civilization had received sanction at the highest social levels. Parallel forms of endorsement have been common for a much longer time in the United States, where rock and roll and its various corollary and sub-genres have become identified as being essential components of American culture on all levels. It has not always been so. Frank Sinatra’s assessment of the music -- “sung, played, and written for the most part by cretinous goons . . . the most brutal, ugly, desperate, vicious form of expression it has been my misfortune to hear”-- (James/ CIR application 1 is not an untypical example of the panic that surrounded what everyone in the mid-1950s-musicians, sociologists, educators, and politicians alike-- recognized as a significant rupture in American culture. But now the various popular musics that have developed from it have been integrated into all other forms of Western culture (television, film, literature, dance, fashion, art, and all other forms of music), all other aspects of the entertainment and advertising industries, and into social, economic, and political life generally. Contemporary popular music is no longer simply a sonic or auditory phenomenon but, much more so than previous musical practices, it is fundamentally an intermedia form, existing within a plethora of other media, especially film and television. As a result, it can only be understood via interdisciplinary modes of analysis. Cinema has been intrinsic to its evolution. In the mid-1905s, only fly-by-night exploitation film producers were willing to invest in it. The only major studio film, Fox’s The Girl Can’t Help It, starred Jayne Mansfield as a young woman who did everything she could to avoid becoming a rock and roll star. Around the same time, Elvis Presley, a supreme if supremely contradictory figure in American culture, initially made a more productive migration from pop to cinema, but after his return from the army, his Hollywood career increasingly stood in for his absence from the musical milieu. But after the Beatles, who had already transformed American popular music in the 1960s and introduced Britain as a significant factor in global pop music and films dealing with it, released A Hard Day’s Night, everything changed. The film was an enormous financial and critical success, and it also generated a new synergistic interdependence between the movie and record industries, specifically in uniting the creation of the soundtrack album and the film as interdependent components of a single entrepreneurial endeavor. From this point, through the 1980s, a series of such combined film/ music undertakings (Woodstock, Saturday Night Fever, Tommy, and so on) returned enormous profits while providing the most powerful repertoire of images for youth (James/ CIR application 2 cultures, and also transforming the structure of the film and music industries. For the past two decades, these industries have been entirely integrated with each other, and popular music has become an integral part of the semiology, thematics, and marketing-strategies of a large proportion of contemporary entertainment films. Pop music, film, and television are all interdependent forms of the unified cultural gestalt that dominates the American, European and increasingly global imagination and pocket-book. Despite the manifest importance of these developments, neither the rock and roll film nor rock and roll TV shows have received serious academic attention. The classical musical of the 1930s-1950s is a major concern of cinema studies; it and parallel genres-- the modern gangster film, science fiction film, even pornography-- have all generated sizable critical and theoretical literatures. But what is arguably one of the most radically transformative development in the entertainment industry has been largely ignored. What books there are on the topic are fans’ compendia listing films that contain rock and roll in some form or other, such as Marshall Crenshaw’s Hollywood Rock: A Guide to Rock’n’roll in the Movies (New York: HarperPerennial, 1994); though these are invaluable resources, none contain scholarly analysis of the kind that modern film studies has developed for other genres. The only single-author book that I have found is R. Serge Denisoff and William Romanowski, Risky Business: Rock in Film (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1991), which is informative on the industrial developments that sustained the synergy between the two mediums, but which is entirely unaware of the methodologies of academic film analysis. My project will rectify this situation. It is organized historically, structured on a periodization of the history of post-1950s popular music into a series of phases: the beginning in the mid-1950s; the folk-music boom of the early 1960s; the British Invasion of the mid-1960s; the American counter-culture of the late 1960s; early 1970s soul music; then disco, punk, hip- (James/ CIR application 3 hop/rap, and so on. I take each of these as marking, not only a musical evolution, but also an evolution in the position of rock and roll in the music industry (the gradual move from marginal production small record companies to a central position in the integrated film/music/ television/entertainment conglomerates of the 1990s and after). At the same time, the social meaning of the music is transformed; its social implications (delinquent, revolutionary, wholly assimilated, and so on) change, as do the connections it is able to make with other art forms and with other social activities. Finally these developments run parallel, if only roughly, to the evolution of critical methodologies in musicology, film studies, and especially Cultural Studies. For each of these phase, I will select a handful of representative films, and consider them in light of the social meaning and function that the music has in the period and investigate the mechanisms and priorities that inform the translation of the specific music in question to cinema, primarily to the commercial Hollywood cinema and broadcast television, but also to the different forms of non-commercial or marginal film production that each era differently permits. At all stages in these developments, films featuring rock and roll have several functions. Initially they are merely a means of disseminating the music. In films of the earliest period, that of the “Juke Box Musicals” singers and musicians are seen lip-synching to hit records; these are essentially a form of visual radio, providing a visual experience alongside the aural pleasures of the record, though also allowing for the dissemination of other elements that comprise the fan cultures (body language, dance-steps, clothing, hair-styles etc), but the narratives themselves are perfunctory. As the films develop more complicated narratives, more sophisticated strategies of justifying the musical interludes are created. The narratives inevitably generate messages about the social implications of the music as they mobilize attitudes to a number of key themes, especially motifs concerning teenagers and the generation gap, attitudes towards (James/ CIR application 4 sexuality, definitions of delinquency, and attitudes towards ethnic minorities, especially African Americans. The periodic reconstruction of these themes in the different phases of rock and roll registers the transformation of its social meaning; cinema and television become the major arenas in which the often contradictory and provisional implications of the music are negotiated into the public realm. In other words, cinema is one of the mechanisms by which the public comes, not just to know popular music, but to know what it means-- or at least what the agencies who make films think it means. The conditions that determine the negotiation of the music into cinema are often reflected in the issues that the films generate in their narratives. Three final points: i. A proposal to spend a year of researching and writing about the movies and rock and roll is in a double jeopardy; both components may appear to lack the august serious that dignifies legitimate academic undertakings. This is problem that historians of both popular cinema and popular music recurrently face, and indeed I suspect it explains why the present topic has so far been virtually anathema to academic film historians. I hope that my outline above has at least demonstrated that the issues with which I am concerned have affected Western cultural and social life sufficiently profoundly to merit sustained, critical attention. ii. Two, I have previously been concerned to develop methodologies for studying the relations between film and popular music, both in my book Allegories of Cinema (one chapter of which was concerned with the relationship between Underground film and modern jazz) and in occasional writings (e.g. an essay on the use of rock and roll in films and novels about the Vietnam War, published in the journal, Representations). Since then, my other research and administrative responsibilities (I was chair of our department from 1994-1994, and again in 2000) have prevented me from pursuing this topic, and only this year I have been able to return to teaching it. (James/ CIR application 5 iii. the combined aesthetic and sociological bases of this project address long-term developments in Western culture. Though I do not have space to explain it here, these developments can I believe be best understood through the cultural developments that occurred around the time of the Industrial Revolution, the period of Romanticism. As a recent scholar has noted, “Rock is the aesthetic of Romanticism vulgarized” (Robert Pattison, The Triumph of Vulgarity [New York; Oxford University Press, 1987], 188). In returning to English Literature for my overall historical paradigms, I am returning to the field of my dissertation and initial scholarly career. 3. Work Plan: I will spend most of the academic year researching and writing (and being available to my graduate students) here at USC, also working with the archives at UCLA and the Academy of Motion Pictures. But I would also spend perhaps two months in London working at the British Film Institute 4. Other faculty: At present, this is an individual research project. 5. The project will culminated in an approximately 100,000 word book. (James/ CIR application 6